Education reform takes more than innovation and inspiration

I caught this TEDx a while back and a few points really struck a cord with me.

“…when inspiration becomes manipulation, inspiration becomes obfuscation”

After seeing countless TED Talks that were meant to inspire education reform, I found myself duped by what Bratton described as “placebo innovation.” Bratton explains:

In this case the placebo is worse than ineffective, it’s harmful. It diverts your interest, enthusiasm and outrage until it’s absorbed into this black hole of affectation.

Too often I feel like some “reformers” are implying that we’d improve education if every teacher would just realize “x” and “have the courage to change.” Bratton points out:

Problems are not “puzzles” to be solved. That metaphor assumes that all the necessary pieces are already on the table, they just need to be rearranged and reprogrammed. It’s not true. “Innovation” defined as moving the pieces around and adding more processing power is not some Big Idea that will disrupt a broken status quo: that precisely is the broken status quo.

Bottom-line: If the problems we face in education were easy to solve, they’d be solved. But Bratton outlines that tough problems take a lot more than just ‘talk’ (or the latest blog post).

If we really want transformation, we have to slog through the hard stuff (history, economics, philosophy, art, ambiguities, contradictions). Bracketing it off to the side to focus just on technology, or just on innovation, actually prevents transformation.